THIS LONG CENTURY

— I travel all the time for my job, and sometimes take photographs. I bought a decent camera for work to document my show designs but wound up using it more to entertain myself while traveling. I take photos looking out of windows on planes and moving vehicles, or from hotel rooms. I like a distant vantage point. I don’t carry a camera with me on the street in Tokyo or Paris or London, only in emptier cities without landmarks. I look for low horizons, big skies, anonymous buildings, empty streets and lone figures. No monuments, or interesting personalities, and not a travelogue.

I always wanted to travel when I was a kid, by now I’ve been all over the place. It’s the best part of my job. I don’t get to choose where I go, it feels random but it’s limited to locales where a big rock band might play a show and draw an audience, which still leaves a large part of the world untouched. I rarely travel on my own time. I might stay a while in a city I like when a job happens to end there, or go visit friends in a distant place, but I won’t be exploring the Amazon jungle on my time off. Growing up in the ‘70s the Nixon/China TV news left an indelible impression but China is one place I’ve never been, I will have to make my own way there eventually. I like crowded cities not nature. Walking all day long in a frantically busy city is the best possible day off when I’m working, the rhythm of putting one foot in front of the other all day long on a city sidewalk is meditative and energizing at the same time.

I’ve always liked to draw, photography in the pre-digital age was never immediate enough for me in comparison. Digital photography is now so immediate as to be instantly everywhere all the time, a complete inversion. I’m a slow photographer though, I don’t photograph everything all time, and the photos get mulled over, edited and then sent out to a few friends who might be interested. I always think I will eventually use some photos as part of a production design but I never do. I’d like to think I’m training my eye but maybe my eye is as sharp as it’s going to get.

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Susanne Sasic was born in New York City in 1964. She lives in New Jersey. She is a lighting designer and production designer of concert tours and has worked with Nirvana, Sonic Youth, R.E.M., the White Stripes, St. Vincent, David Byrne, Arcade Fire, Stereolab, and Beck.

www.susannesasic.com

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Nate Lowman was born in 1979 in Las Vegas, and lives and works in New York. Recent solo exhibitions include Maccarone, New York (2014), Massimo de Carlo, London (2014), The Brant Foundation, Greenwich CT (2012), The American Academy, Rome (2011), and The Astrup Fearnley Museum, Oslo (2009), among others. He has participated in dozens of group shows at numerous institutions, including P.S.1/MOMA, The Serpentine Gallery, The New Museum, The Guggenheim Museum, and Palais de Tokyo.

www.maccarone.net

— Alastair Galbraith had told me that becoming a parent was a whole new way of falling in love. When my son Sorley was born in 2006, I found out he was right. New worlds of emotional and creative possibilities opened up to me. In some sense, I stopped caring, and with that discovered a whole new depth of caring.

If you’re reading this and have heard my name before it is probably as a musician. The expanded emotional base from which I now operated changed how I made music. Cyril Connolly said, “there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall.” I couldn’t say that anything I’ve done has attained greatness or even if it is art. But, here is some anecdotal evidence against his notion. Before there was a pram in the hall I struggled over several months to write and record half of what became an album called Autumn Response. Once Sorley was born I wrote and recorded the other half in an afternoon. Perhaps it was the sleep deprivation, but now I can’t tell which bits are which. They all seem of a similar quality. Of course, music is only a part of my life. I have changed too. I am told I am a lot more open-minded. I have time for people very different from me and for opinions not my own. When someone means so much, my ego can mean so much less.

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Richard Youngs is a multi-instrumentalist from Glasgow, Scotland. Youngs began releasing albums in the early 90s on various independent labels. His music ranges from pure experimental, instrumental, minimal, and avant-garde through to folk-inspired songwriting and progressive rock.

www.nofansrecords.wordpress.com

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Basel Abbas, born in 1983, in Nicosia, Cyprus, and Ruanne Abou-Rahme, born in 1983, Boston, United States, both live and work in Ramallah, Palestine, and New York. Abbas and Abou-Rahme work together across a range of sound, image, installation and performance practices. Their work explores issues surrounding desire and disaster, spatial politics, subjectivity and the absurdities of contemporary practices of power, often investigating spatio-temporal resonances in the relation between the actual, imagined and remembered. Their practice increasingly examines the immersive, experiential possibilities of sound, image and environment, taking on the form of interdisciplinary installations and live audio-visual performances. They have exhibited and performed internationally and most recently founded the sound and image performance collective Tashweesh.

www.carrollfletcher.com
www.baselandruanne.com

SEEN IN THE MORNING, EN ROUTE TO THE STUDIO

Covered-over graffiti
Faded gang signs
Empty pedestals
Reflections in water
Signs overwhelmed by other signs
Vertical graffiti on posts
Shadows of fences
Fences behind fences
Architectural decoration: elegant and crude
Signs peeling off
Signs chiseled out
Lawn decoration
Signs shaped and hanging out into space
Neon stylization
Grand entrances for little buildings

Philip Hanson, Chicago,
October, 2014

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Philip Hanson was born in 1943 in Chicago. One of the original Imagist artists, Hanson has been a signal Chicago painter since he first came on the scene in the late ’60s. Hanson’s work was included in the 2014 Whitney Biennial. He is the recipient of two grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been included in group shows at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago (1969 and 1972); the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia (1969); the Sao Paulo Bienniale (1973); the Chicago Public Library Cultural Center (1977). He was the subject of a solo retrospective at the Illinois State Museum in Springfield (1985).

www.corbettvsdempsey.com